Edward Seidensticker Libros

Certain conjunctions of time and place exert a special fascination--Paris in the twenties, turn-of-the-century Vienna, Weimar Berlin. Tokyo in the years between the Meiji Restoration and the Earthquake of 1923 is one of these. Until 1867 the city was called Edo--it was the shogun's capital, the biggest city in a country almost completely closed to the outside world for two and a half centuries. Then, helter-skelter, it became a modern metropolis brimming with Western fads, ideas, and technologies, exuberantly inventing and imitating even as it yearned for the past it was destroying. East and West met here as never before--or since.

Filled with rich description and luxurious beauty, these ten tales of loss and longing from one of Japan's greatest writers show the pull between duty and desire, ecstasy and death- a mother lost in mourning, a moonlit journey to fulfil a wish, a night of infidelity, a young lieutenant who ends his life.

Librarian note: An alternative cover edition can be found hereThis is an enchanting essay on aesthetics by one of the greatest Japanese novelists. Tanizaki's eye ranges over architecture, jade, food, toilets, and combines an acute sense of the use of space in buildings, as well as perfect descriptions of lacquerware under candlelight and women in the darkness of the house of pleasure. The result is a classic description of the collision between the shadows of traditional Japanese interiors and the dazzling light of the modern age.

A continuation of the author's history of Tokyo explains how the city recovered from both a major earthquake and Allied bombing raids in World War II